


Love Machine

by kuro49



Category: Pacific Rim (2013)
Genre: Canon Compliant, Other
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2014-08-29
Updated: 2014-08-29
Packaged: 2018-02-15 06:08:58
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,329
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/2218686
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/kuro49/pseuds/kuro49
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>To Striker, Gipsy’s plasma cannon is the sun in the rain.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Love Machine

**Author's Note:**

> This is the implied OT6 (or 7 given that Stacker is a little late to the whole Gipsy&Striker dynamics) that I have wanted to write for a while, just with a lot more jumps around the time frames of the movie than I first intended now :P

She meets her in the rain, and her plasma cannon is like the sun among the insistent fall.

It’s the singular thought of _eureka!_ seeing Gipsy Danger here, water falling from her metal hull. And ain’t this the kind of things love at first sight is made of?

Striker has a taste for brawler brutality, and Chuck Hansen mirrors that. Thinking it must be his father he takes this after, he swings and he takes every blow to heart. He lands on his knees and there’s blood bleeding into his mouth.

Here, has-been, Raleigh Becket, stands above him, and Chuck doesn’t learn to flinch away.

 

She meets her in the rain, and it’s a quiet affair.

Her visor having gone dark, her movement halted. Standing there, knee deep in water with Leatherback and its fists raised above its head, the rain falling still. It’s something different altogether as her nuclear heart bleeds red for her.

Gipsy has a taste for making sure the dead stays dead, and Raleigh Becket learns this the hard way. Knowing it as a R.A.B.I.T. that runs quicker than he can blink, it is Yancy Becket’s last words as a loop in his head. It is death without dying for him, and she thinks she can understand.

His co-pilot is not Yancy, his co-pilot is Mako Mori, and he takes after her when he has Charles Hansen on the ground, one arm twisted behind his back. Hurting him further still.

 

She meets him in the rain, under the brim of her black umbrella, and she makes the kind of remark that Chuck would be proud of.

If they still spoke to each other like they do when they were younger, if they can still look at each other without digging in their claws from when the vicious turns into the downright ugly.

 

Striker has a taste for danger.

And Gipsy, well, Gipsy has a taste for a single moment of eureka.

 

It’s a full metal romance even with all these ghosts.

And there are ghosts in their machines, far too many being pitted against one another, fighting the kind of war no one is about to win. Not like this when it is Raleigh against Yancy and those last words that don’t know their way out of his head, out of _her_ head, out of Gipsy Danger’s drift memories even when her code takes after Striker’s systems now. It is Hercules and Scott, and those ugly marks of black in their files that don’t rub out, even as he fights tooth and nail to wash out the acrid taste of a man he can no longer stand to have in every crevice of his head.

It is Chuck with Angela, and that single blink of his eyes, the sight of Sydney captured in a single frame before the second nuclear blast makes land, and thinking it should've been her instead.

It is Mako with—

There is also love in their machines.

 

Mako only associates good things with this man that calls her Miss Mori.

Looking like he has been taken apart, put together, and put back all wrong, Mark I pilots like him though, they are built differently. Like him, and sensei, and Tamsin, they are made of something from before the war, from when they can still wade across the ocean floor and not feel a hand dragging them under.

It is admiration, and respect and wishing she could, one day, compare.

 

She gets down on one knee, Max bumping his wet nose to her hands.

(He gets down on one knee, kissing the top of Max’s head in his drivesuit.)

Each time, Hercules Hansen stands still before them.

 

(Each time, Stacker Pentecost remains a fixed point.)

 

Chuck knows the touch of Raleigh Becket’s hand as he lands a blow over the slope of his shoulders. Raleigh knows the give Chuck Hansen allows as he fights him exactly as Mako would. He takes him apart, his hands moving like hers across him.

It’s not ghosting if there’s only one failed drift between them.

 

To Striker, Gipsy’s plasma cannon is the sun in the rain.

To Chuck, Mako and Raleigh are a disgrace. For Herc, he isn’t about to say, out loud, that his son is not all wrong. (And to Stacker, he doesn’t blame anyone but himself.)

 

Except now, it is his voice going against the wind and the roar of a Kaiju meeting its match.

It is Gipsy Danger dropping down into Victoria bay, and Chuck Hansen saying what Striker Eureka can’t. There’s a way through their heads that isn’t drift compatibility. It’s called a conversation.

And Hercules Hansen still doesn’t know how to have one.

 

_No pulse_ , she says. His voice overlapping hers, intertwining from two to one, and then one into a solitary weight that settles in their shared headspace. ( _No pulse_ , Yancy Becket echoes like he’s got a place still in this wide, wild blue.)

 

She turns her head in the crowd, stares down Chuck until he isn’t looking away.

Until Herc isn’t trying to smile at her in that way that makes him look infinitely sadder, though that might just be the sling holding his right arm close to his chest.

Raleigh takes Herc’s hand, and she can feel the ghosting warmth of his palm in his.

Chuck nods and Raleigh touches her arm, two fingers at the crook of her elbow, and she doesn’t need to see to know that it is instinctual now. That he looks at her like the first time he sees Gipsy after years and years of being drummed out of the Jaeger Program. That he looks at her like she already won the war, like she can win against anything and everything that comes out of the Anteverse.

He is looking at her like she has slammed his breath out of his chest, like they are still on the Kwoon mats and he has a bruise blossoming right beneath his ribs from where her bō strikes him.

She looks at him— she looks at him and knows exactly that he is the one she is waiting for. Her chance to get inside a Jaeger, for better or worse.

There’s a name for what he is to her, her to him, and it is not entirely love.

And then, it is Marshal Stacker Pentecost that steps into the picture.

 

The Jaeger are in the Jaeger Bay, and there is the sound of metal mourning.

Gipsy wants Striker. Striker needs Gipsy.

Mako Mori cannot put this into words anyone can understand. Only they know when they are speaking all at once. His with hers, hers with theirs. And it’s because Jaeger and co-pilots have something thin like threads, thick like ropes, keeping them all as one: Raleigh to Mako, to Chuck to Herc, to Striker to Gipsy, to Stacker to Chuck, and back, and back, and back.

Gipsy wants Striker, and Striker needs Gipsy to finish this.

 

It’s rain hitting the metal hull, it’s water hitting the helmets of their pilot suits.

He and she and they remember her plasma cannon like the sun in the rain.

It’s tears hitting their cheeks.

 

Striker’s dust, Gipsy’s ashes.

And there is the taste of metal in the water that doesn’t go away. It’s the blood, they will tell you, years in the future when Jaeger don’t exist and pilots are a relic.

It’s the salty taste of a love story between war machines, and the ones of the dying and the dead, of legends of a girl with blue wisps in her hair. Of a boy who went down on one knee, and another with lines burned into his left side. Of one last stand made by a man that should have been on his death bed, and one more, of a man who has loved everything that dies before him.

There’s blood in the water, there’s also no more blue.

 

XXX Kuro


End file.
